These are opening shots in Glasgow 99, a year-long festival of architecture and design. It is the last of the Towards 2000 arts years dreamed up in another era when the old UK-wide Arts Council had Lord Palumbo at its helm and a slight but discernible sense of vision. The first exhibition, in the palatial surroundings of the Kelvingrove art gallery and museum, is Fruitmarket, is called Vertigo - the strange new world of the contemporary city. This makes you feel bad about architecture. What, exactly, has happened in the 40 years since Wright died?

We have attempted some of his ideas, but we have lost the vision along the way. Consider: in 1935, Wright proposed "Broadacre City", an endless suburban utopia ruled by the motor car. Later he added helicopters for good measure. Other people made Broadacre City happen. It has many names, but we know it as Milton Keynes. Then in 1956, Wright designed a skyscraper, the "Illinois Mile High". Other people are about to make that happen, too. It also has many names, but one of them is the Shanghai World Financial Center, and you will find it in Vertigo. In both cases, the transition from Wright's seductive if flawed vision to dumb, everyday reality is almost unbearable.

You might imagine that a show with such a name would be all about skyscrapers, but it isn't. It's all about different buildings in different cities at the end of the 20th century - all by chance in roughly the same latitude in the northern hemisphere. Beyond that, there is nothing to link them. No theme, no vision, comes through. We are offered little guidance. Vertigo presents us only with the prevailing anarchy of appearance. Commentary is mostly provided by means of the odd telling juxtaposition. It is all very hands-off. The exhibition designers, architects Caruso St. John, have turned the big open space of the Old Fruitmarket - a Glaswegian Covent Garden - into a convincing simulacrum of a modern series of galleries for the show. Their design, too, is doggedly neutral. Your responses are not conditioned by heavy-handed presentation techniques.